Rebecca MacKinnon's postings about work, reading, and ideas from 2004-2011.

March 20, 2008

Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei reports that China's State Administration for Radio Film and Television (SARFT) has included Chinese YouTube clone Tudou on list of 35 "slightly unhealthy" a websites that will be punished and fined. He points out: "None of Tudou's real competitors like Youku.com or 56.com are on the list: the rest of the websites mentioned are small and unknown players." SARFT has also published a list of 25 "extremely unhealthy" websites ordered to be shut down. He observes: "all the websites in the list seem to be fly by night video downloading BBS and small, relatively unknown video sites. Many of them have names that imitate other, more popular websites, e.g. Xunleicn.com whose name is ripped off from the popular Xunlei.com."

Jeremy concludes: "Despite being named on a list of insignificant and mostly lousy websites, this seems like good news for Tudou, as long as the fine is not too severe." Certainly beats being shut down, which was recently rumored to be Tudou's impending fate.

Pacific Epoch also reports on the lists, noting that Tudou's content filtering has increased dramatically:

Users of Tudou.com have noticed an uploading slowdown since Tudou shutdown its site for a full day on March 14, reports 21st Century Business Herald. According to users quoted in the report, the entire process from video uploading to publishing now takes about 24 hours. After the temporary closure, Tudou recommenced user-generated content uploading on March 17. Filters at Tudou.com competitor Youku.com can publish videos within half an hour after uploading, according to Youku CEO Victor Koo.

Interesting. So I guess they're taking extra precautions to vet everything before it gets published. So the question is: does Youku have better censorship technology, more staff to handle content control, better official guanxi, or some combination of the three?

March 15, 2008

On Friday Kaiser Kuo was on top of the news that Tudou shut down for 24 hours to "move servers." They're now back up again. All this amidst mysterious reports that Tudou had been ordered to shut down by SARFT, which Tudou public relations people had denied knowledge of.

Kaiser points to a Sohu story about the brief shutdown which references the SARFT shutdown order and quotes a "responsible person" at Tudou saying that it really was a server move with no relation to the reported shutdown order. Kaiser's analysis:

If this really was punishment originating with SARFT, then it was mighty light — really, just a wrist-slap. If it was what the Tudou party line says — ho hum, we’re just moving servers — then it’s strange that users, let alone advertisers, weren’t notified. Not to mention of course the fact that the timing was bound to get people speculating.

Jeremy Goldkorn at Danwei.org observes:

Nobody in the industry believes the explanation of the server move: see for example this article
on Enorth.com.cn which says that the server moving explanation is
"suspicious" and also says that this may be the "most serious case" of
a website shutting down in the history of the Chinese Internet.

Jeremy also reminds us of a Marbridge Consulting report on Tuesday about how 42 online video websites had signed a "self-discipline" agreement, but Tudou was not among those listed. (See the SARFT text of the pledge here and a Xinhua report about the original eight signatories in Chinese here.)

Speaking of timing, over the past couple days YouTubers have been busy uploading video (mainly taken from various TV news reports) about protests in Tibet... making this an excellent time for a company trying to stay out of trouble to schedule a server move - and beef up content filtering and monitoring systems while they're at it.

January 04, 2008

There is a lot of press today about China's new regulation which appears to decree that only state-owned or state-controlled companies can show or stream online video. As usual, there's the literal reading, then there's the reading of the tea leaves.

Geoffrey Fowler at the Wall Street Journal has a solid story. As Andy Greenberg points out on Forbes.com, its unclear whether the rules will actually be enforced, or how, or whether they are a "shot across the bow."

Note that Marbridge Consulting published an English translation of the rules on Dec. 29th. The original Chinese is here.

For in-depth and informed analysis of the situation, be sure to read today's piece by the China Media Project's David Bandurski: Internet censors move to quiet debate on new online video and audio regulations. He reports that many Chinese journalists and news editors are strongly opposed to the new regulations, quoting two strongly worded editorials in Chinese newspapers (one of them already censored). With so much open opposition, chances are that the regulation is likely to get watered down in the way it's enforced.

Also be sure to read this analysis by Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn, who feels that much of the Western media coverage has been guilty of "gross exaggeration." He agrees with Kaiser Kuo who wrote in late December: "My gut take on this is that it’s more about holding these video sharing and P2P companies responsible for naughty content than about trying to shake- or shut down the industry."

Reading Marbridge's summary of the regulations, it seems that the regulation's main thrust is threefold: First is to regulate all kinds of streaming video sites - some of them live - that have popped up with all kinds of content that you'll never see on officially sanctioned TV. Second is to regulate P2P video sharing which as Kaiser points out has a lot to do with porn. Third relates to Web2.0 "user-generated content" sites: Chinese YouTube clones like Tudou, Youku.com, 56.com. The regulations seem intended to create more uniform standards for censorship on Chinese online video-sharing sites, combined with a more uniform enforcement and "reporting" structure with SARFT (State Authority for Radio, Film, and Television) as the main government body to which these sites must answer.

All video sites hosted inside China will have to obtain licenses from SARFT and the MII (Ministry of Information Industry) in order to be legal. Thus it becomes easier to shut them down if they violate the terms of their licenses which would include stipulations about content control. The regulations also state that video sites are required to have either state ownership or state investment - however my hunch is that this element will likely be met with creative work-arounds. I would imagine that the larger companies with foreign investment and established brand names will still be able to operate as long as they make adjustments to the way in which their ownership and investment structures look on paper, obtain the required licenses, and adhere to the required censorship systems.

Its not as if China's video sharing sites haven't already been censoring content. All the established ones have been employing whole divisions of people whose job it is to monitor their services for objectionable content (porn and politically sensitive material), taking down anything that could cause trouble for their company. As John Kennedy of Global Voices reported during the Yilishen "ant farmer" protests, a lot of the protest videos uploaded onto Chinese sites got taken down quite quickly after being uploaded. Some people took it upon themselves to download and re-upload these protest videos to YouTube before they disappeared. This is all part of China's rapidly-evolving and increasingly sophisticated Web 2.0 censorship system, in which the private sector is expected to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to censoring user-generated content. For more on how this system works see my recent blog posts Censorship 2.0 and Is Web 2.0 a wash for free speech in China?

Most press reports have been asking about YouTube. It is hosted outside of China and is thus subject to the whims of the Great Firewall. It has been blocked before, it can be blocked again. The only way for YouTube to avoid being blocked in China is to do a deal similar to the one they did for Google.cn, their Chinese search engine hosted inside China. and agree to censor content. So far, while Google agreed to censor its search engine, it has drawn the line at user-generated content and opted not to create a censored version of Blogspot.com, which tends to be blocked in China. If they plan to be consistent, they would refuse to censor YouTube as well... and just put up with being blocked. It will be interesting to see how they decide to proceed.

October 07, 2006

Earlier this week I attended an off-the-record meeting (i.e., no blogging about the details of who was there and exactly what was said by whom) with a group of executives from various news and media organizations to discuss the future of news. These news organizations are all trying to figure out how to rethink pretty much everything: the way they report and deliver the news, how they interact with their audiences, how they interface and collaborate with citizens' media, PLUS re-invent their business models - so that they can find a way to pay the salaries of quality journalists and newsgathering operations. Put it this way: assuming that reliable, factually accurate and thorough journalism that informs the public discourse on important issues is something that society values - how do you provide it to the public it in a way that can be monetized, and how do you pay to support the kind of journalistic work that is difficult, dangerous, time consuming and expensive?

The fact that nobody has found any good answers - at least not for the American newspaper industry - was demonstrated on Thursday when Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeffrey Johnson was forced out of his job by the Tribune Co. As the L.A. Times itself reported, his ouster came "a little more than a month after he defied the media conglomerate's demands for staff cuts that he suggested could damage the newspaper." After reporting the circumstances of Johnson's ouster, the L.A. Times describes the larger context: "The turmoil at Tribune's largest property comes at a time of marked uncertainty for many media companies, which have seen their audiences and advertising revenues declining with competition from the Internet and other news outlets."

Doc Searls believes newspapers are in crisis because they "are resolutely clueless about how to adapt to a world that is increasingly networked and self-informing. And Wall Street knows that." He then offers ten recommendations for how newspapers might turn themselves around. There is a lot of sound advice in there - much of which was discussed at the above-mentioned meeting (which he didn't attend though I wish he had). Click here to read all his recommendations at length. His ninth recommendation emphasizes an issue that many news execs are just becoming aware of: with a few notable exceptions, most news media websites are struggling to evolve from the "old Static Web" of the 1990's to today's "Live Web." This "Live Web" - or Web 2.0 as techies and venture capitalists like to call it - just happens to be the natural habitat of blogs, wikis, YouTube, and MySpace. As Doc writes:

Ninth, get hip to the Live Web. That's the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that's growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static verbs. They're the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what's needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).

Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now. It's dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that's syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not "just semantic". It's fundamental. It's how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. ...

Dan Gillmor, who was at the same meeting I attended earlier this week, made a great point during the discussions about how news organizations are compounding their inability to innovate by slashing their staffs and investing little or nothing in research and development - the kind of "R&D" investment that's obligatory for any technology company. Blogging later from the J-Lab's Citizens' Media Summit, Dan expanded on this idea, pointing out that much of the most ground-breaking technology innovations in the news media field are coming from small citizens' media startups:

One thing they have in common: they all developed their own software to run their sites — and now they’re selling that software. The social networking software developed for Bakotopia — which goes beyond letting users blog and add photos and gives them MySpace-like profile pages, and the ability to add other users to “friend lists” is now for sale. Morris Digital now sells the mdSPOTTED photo gallery software that enables reader-participants of Bluffton Today to upload photos to the site. And YourHub, a community platform in a box for newspapers, is now licensed in nearly a dozen markets.

Dan also sees an exciting opportunity for journalism schools and journalism students:

My sense is that journalism is becoming a high-tech profession — not just in using the net as a distribution mechanism but developing new software. Which brings me to another point: J-schools should start thinking about technology transfer. Tech schools often make quite a bit of money licensing technologies developed in university labs. J-schools should start creating the next-generation technology platforms — and fund new innovations from licensing revenues.

This is a great idea. As I wrote in a blog post here last December, technology has now evolved to the point at which the most interesting innovations are happening at the edges: users are experimenting with open-source software and creating "hacks" that enable them do what they want. You don't need a huge corporate budget and casts of thousands behind you to innovate in media anymore - in fact having a large organization to manage (and shareholders to answer to when things don't pan out) increasingly looks like an impediment to experimentation and creative thinking. I've had conversations with people who work in the web departments of news organizations whose understanding of RSS, tagging and other standard features of the read-write web (or semantic web or Live Web, or Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call it) pale in comparison with that of many self-taught bloggers who learned by playing around with the free and/or inexpensive software tools. Dan's right, there's no reason why journalism students couldn't be the source of some of the next big innovations in news - if journalism schools would do more to support and encourage them in doing so.